Fly Away Peter

by David Malouf

  ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised that he should have stopped and turned, ‘abos!’ Then repeated it as if he hadn’t understood. ‘Abos!’

  There was an explosion. Breaking glass. A bottle had been dashed against a tree-trunk, and a figure staggered out into the glow of the streetlamp, a black silhouette that became a white-shirted man with his hands over his face and blood between them. He weaved about, but very lightly. He might have been executing a graceful dance, all on his own there, till another figure, hurling itself from the shadows, brought him down. There were thumps. A woman’s raucous laughter.

  ‘Abos,’ the girl said again with cool disgust, as if the rituals being enacted, however violent, and in whatever degenerate form, were ordinary and not to be taken note of. ‘Aren’t you coming in then? Slow-coach!’

  Her name was Connie. Jim was quite pleased with himself, and with her as well. Walking back afterwards, in the early evening, with the town very lively still and a lot of young fellows standing about drunk under lampposts, some of them with girls but always talking excitedly to one another, he was able to take all this action more easily. Maybe it concerned him, maybe it didn’t. So much of what a man was existed within and was known only to himself, and to those, even strangers, to whom he might occasionally, slowly, reveal it.

  He stood at the entrance to the bridge and watched the dark waters of the river swarming with lights and saw the butt of his cigarette, glowing all the way, make a wide arc towards it. Nothing had changed.

  But back at the boarding house where he usually stayed, he was wakened not long after he fell asleep by a great noise in the street below, and going with one or two others to the balcony, saw a procession making its way towards them of what looked like thousands. He had never seen so many people in one place before.

  They were young men mostly, and some were in uniform, a group of naval ensigns; but there were also women of all ages, and they were all shouting and cheering and offering up snatches of song. At the head of the crowd, on the shoulders of one of the white-suited navy boys, was a little fair-headed lad in a kilt, who was waving his arms about among the flags. He seemed significant in some way – the crowd had chosen him as a symbol – and Jim felt disturbed; he couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was the hour. The loose excitement that had been about all day, and had found no focus, had gathered itself to a head at last and was careering through the streets, sweeping everything before it. Sleepy Brisbane! It might be Paris or somewhere, with all these people surging about in the middle of the night, marching with linked arms and chanting slogans. Crowds made him nervous. Is this what it will be like from now on? he asked himself. Will I get used to it?

  One of the old-timers who shared the room with him explained. They were coming, this great press of people, from the Market square, where they had gathered to hear an address from the Lord Mayor. Those noisy outriders of the procession, blatant youths waving scraps of paper, were those who had been enrolled earlier in the evening at the Town Hall, over five hundred they said, and considered themselves to be soldiers already and therefore released from civilian restraint. They were at war.

  Jim looked, and wondered if his certainty of a little earlier, that he need not be concerned, would hold. When he went back to bed he couldn’t sleep. Far off, the crowd was still spasmodically sending up faint hurrahs, and scraps of tunes, half-familiar, came to his ear: The Boys of the Old Brigade – they liked that one, they sang it twice – and more solemnly, God Save the King. Lying back with his arms folded under his head, an ordinary if unpatriotic stance, he could imagine all those others falling still and coming to attention as they sang. It might, after all, be serious.

  In the morning, as he buttoned his shirt at the window, he looked again at the street where the procession had passed – it was littered with tramtickets and sheets of trampled newspaper that sailed in the westerly – then across the flat, weatherboard city to the hills. By midday he was home.

  ‘Anything much going on in Brisbane?’ Miss Harcourt enquired.

  ‘Well,’ Jim said, ‘you know. The war. Not much otherwise.’

  Miss Harcourt looked concerned for a moment and he thought she too might ask if he would go. But she didn’t.

  Jim stroked his upper lip, where for two days now he had been nursing the beginning of a moustache.

  6

  THEY WERE THE days of the big migrations, those last days of August and early September, and Jim spent long hours observing and noting down new arrivals: the first refugees Miss Harcourt called them – a strange word, he wondered where she had heard it. He never had.

  Tree martins first, but they came only from the Islands and they came to breed; great flocks of them were suddenly there overnight, already engaged in re-making old nests; dotterel and grey-crowned knots, the various tattlers; once a lone greenshank; then sharp-tailed sandpipers, wood sandpipers from the Balkans, whimbrel, grey plover, the Eastern Curlew, Japanese snipe, fork-tailed swifts from Siberia; then much later, towards the turn of the year, Terek sandpipers and pratincoles, the foreign ones in the same flock with locals but clearly distinguishable. He filled book after book with his sightings, carefully noting the numbers and dates of arrival.

  The first sight of a bird, there again, after so many months’ absence, in the clear round of his glasses, with a bit of local landscape behind it, a grass tuft or reeds or a raft of sticks – that was the small excitement. Quickly he took from his pocket the folded notebook with its red oilcloth cover and the pencil stub from behind his ear, and with his eye still on the bird, made his illegible scribbles. The greater excitement was in inscribing what he had seen into The Book.

  Using his best copybook hand, including all the swirls and hooks and tails on the capital letters that you left off when you were simply jotting things down, he entered them up, four or five to a page. This sort of writing was serious. It was giving the creature, through its name, a permanent place in the world, as Miss Harcourt did through pictures. The names were magical. They had behind them, each one, in a way that still seemed mysterious to him, as it had when he first learned to say them over in his head, both the real bird he had sighted, with its peculiar markings and its individual cry, and the species with all its characteristics of diet, habits, preference for this or that habitat, kind of nest, number of eggs etc. Out of air and water they passed through their name, and his hand as he carefully formed its letters, into The Book. Making a place for them there was giving them existence in another form, recognizing their place in the landscape, or his stretch of it: providing ‘sanctuary’.

  He did his entering up at a particular time and in a particular frame of mind. He liked to have the lamp set just so, and chose a good pen and the best ink; bringing to the occasion his fullest attention; concentrating, as he had on those long boring afternoons at the one teacher school when he had first, rather reluctantly and without at all knowing what it was to be for, learned to form the round, full-bodied letters; and adding with a flourish now the crosses of the big F’s, the curled tails of the Q’s. He was proud of his work, and pleased when, each week, he was able to show Ashley what he had added.

  ‘Beautiful!’ Ashley said for the names, the writing, as he never did for the actual birds, to which he brought only his silence. And that was right. It pleased Jim to have the verbal praise for The Book and silence in the face of the real creature as it lifted its perfect weight from water into air, since in that way Ashley’s reaction mirrored his own.

  When Ashley and Julia Bell were married at the end of the year Jim presented them with the first of the Books; not exactly as a wedding gift, since that would have been presumptuous, and anyway, the Book was Ashley’s already, but as a mark of the occasion. With it went the first of Miss Harcourt’s pictures.

  7

  IT WAS JUST before that, in late November, that Jim caught one day, in a casual sweep of his glasses over a marshy bank, a creature that he recognized and then didn’t: the beak was too long and down-curved, the body too
large for any of the various sandpipers. He stared and didn’t know what it was. He couldn’t have been more puzzled, more astonished, if he’d found a unicorn.

  Next day, just on the offchance, he took Miss Harcourt to the place and they waited, silent for the most part, and talking about nothing much when they did talk, while Jim covered the area with his glasses.

  Miss Harcourt rather sprawled, with her boots at the end of outstretched legs and her great skirt rumpled, not at all minding the dust. Her bonnet was always lopsided and she didn’t mind that either. She had her own rules and kept them but she didn’t care for other people’s. Jim’s father thought her mad: ‘That old girl you hang about with,’ he sneered ‘she’s a bit of a hatter.’ But she spoke like a lady, she didn’t hit the bottle and had, except for her passion for photography and the equipment she lugged about, no visible eccentricities. People found her, as a subject for gossip, unmanageable, unrewarding, and she oughtn’t to have been; they resented it. So his father and some others called her mad but could not furnish evidence. She refused to become a character. In the end they left her alone.

  Jim chewed a match, working it round and round his jaw.

  At last it was there. It had stepped right out of cover into a break between reeds. Raising a finger to warn her, he passed the field-glasses.

  ‘By that clump of reeds,’ he whispered, ‘at ten o’clock.’

  She took the glasses, drew herself up with some difficulty, and looked. She gave a little gasp that filled out and became a sigh, a soft ‘Ooooh’.

  ‘What is it?’

  She sat back and lowered the glasses to her lap.

  ‘Jim,’ she said, ‘it’s a dunlin. You couldn’t miss it. They used to come in thousands back home, all along the shore and in the marshes. Common as starlings.’

  He took the glasses and stared at this rare creature he had never laid eyes on till yesterday that was as common as a starling.

  ‘Dunlin,’ he said.

  And immediately on his lips it sounded different, and it wasn’t just the vowel. She could have laughed outright at the newness of the old word now that it had arrived on this side of the globe, at its difference in his mouth and hers.

  ‘But here,’ he said.

  He raised the glasses again.

  ‘It doesn’t occur.’

  But it was there just the same, moving easily about and quite unconscious that it had broken some barrier that might have been laid down a million years ago, in the Pleiocene, when the ice came and the birds found ways out and since then had kept to the same ways. Only this bird hadn’t.

  ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘Sweden. The Baltic. Iceland. Looks like another refugee.’

  He knew the word now. Just a few months after he first heard it, it was common, you saw it in the papers every day.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we should try and get a photograph. Imagine if it’s the very first.’ He longed to observe the squat body in flight, to see the wing-formation and the colour of the underwings and the method of it, which had brought the creature, alone of its kind, so far out of the way. But he didn’t want it to move. Not till they’d got the photo. He kept the bird in his glasses, as if he could hold it there, on that patch of home ground, so long as he was still looking, the frame of the lens being also in some way magical, a boundary it would find it difficult to cross. He was sweating with the effort, drawing sharp breaths. At last, after a long time, he didn’t know how long, he laid the glasses regretfully aside and found Miss Harcourt regarding him with a smile.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said self-consciously, aware that his intensity sometimes made him a fool.

  ‘Nothing, Jim. Nothing’s the matter.’

  She had been watching him as closely as he had watched the bird.

  Next day she came with her equipment, her ‘instruments of martyrdom’ she called them, and took the photograph. It wasn’t difficult. Jim sat, when it was developed, and stared. It seemed odd to her that it should be so extraordinary, though it was of course, this common little visitor to the shores of her childhood, with its grating cry that in summers back there she would, before it was gone, grow weary of, which here was so exotic, and to him so precious. The way he was clutching the picture! She was amazed by this new vision of him, his determination, his intensity.

  ‘I was the first to see it,’ he told her, ‘I must be, or someone would have left a record. Miss Harcourt, we’ve discovered something!’

  Rediscovered, she might have said, speaking for her own experience; but was moved just the same to be included.

  The most ordinary thing in the world.

  She had come so far to where everything was reversed that even that didn’t surprise her.

  8

  ONE DAY BERT, Ashley Crowther’s aviator friend, offered to take Jim up for a ‘spin’.

  Jim hesitated, but recognizing that it was really Ashley’s doing, and had been intended as a gift, he felt he couldn’t refuse, though he had no real curiosity about how things would look from above. New views of things didn’t interest him, and he realized, now that it was about to happen, that he had a blood fear, a bone fear, of leaving the earth, some sense, narrow and primitive, derived maybe from a nightmare he had forgotten but not outgrown, that the earth was man’s sphere and the air was for the birds, and that though man might break out of whatever bounds had been set him, and in doing so win a kind of glory, it was none the less a stepping out of himself that would lead to no good. Jim was conservative. He preferred to move at ground level When he raised his eyes skyward it was to wonder at creatures who were other than himself.

  But he appeared at the appointed time in the big paddock beyond the house, with his hands in his pockets, his jaw set, and his hat pulled down hard on his brow.

  The flying machine sat among cow-pats casting a squat shadow. It had two planes mounted one above the other and four booms leading out to the tail, which was a box affair with rudders. The place where you sat (there was room for two sitting in tandem) was on the main plane, and the whole thing, as if no one had considered at the beginning how to hold all the various bits of it together, was crossed and criss-crossed with piano-wire. It looked improvised, as if Bert had put it together especially for the occasion. Jim saw nothing in it that suggested flight, no attempt to reproduce in wood, canvas, metal, the beauty of the bird. It looked more like a monstrous cage, and he wasn’t at all surprised to hear Bert refer to it as ‘the crate’.

  Jim regarded it in a spirit of superstitious dread; and in fact these machines too, in the last months, had entered a new dimension. After just a few seasons of gliding over the hills casting unusual shadows and occasionally clipping the tops of trees, new toys of a boyish but innocent adventuring, they had changed their nature and become weapons. Already they were being used to drop bombs and had been organized, in Europe, into a new fighting arm. Bert was shortly to join such a force. In a week or two he would be sailing to England and soon afterwards might be flying over France. In the meantime they were in Ashley Crowther’s dry paddock on a hot day towards the end of June. The air glittered and was still.

  ‘Right you are Jim,’ Bert said briskly. He was wearing goggles set far back on his head, which was covered with a leather skull-cap. He looked, Jim thought, with the round eyes set above his forehead, like some sort of cross between a man and a grasshopper. ‘Just put these on, old fellow,’ he said, offering Jim, with all the jolly camaraderie of a new mystery with its own jargon, and its own paraphernalia, the chance of a similar transformation, ‘it’s a bit breezy up there, and you’ll want to see what there is to see, won’t you? That’s the whole point. Let me show you how to get in.’

  Jim accepted the uniform, but felt too heavy for flight, as if he belonged to an earlier version of the species that would never make the crossing. Conscious of the weight of his boots, his hands, the bones in his pelvis, he climbed in behind Bert, terribly cramped in the narrow seat and already sweating. The breeze
was singing in the wires, and it seemed to him for a moment that they were about to make their ascent in some sort of harp that they were taking up, for Ashley’s amusement, to be played by the wind. I know what fascinates Ashley, he thought. It’s all this piano wire!

  ‘Good luck!’ Ashley shouted, flapping his arms as if he might be about to take off under his own steam.

  ‘Just relax,’ Bert shouted. ‘The machine does the flying. All we have to do is sit still. You’re safe as houses in a crate like this.’

  One of the boys from the sheds, who had been coming out to do this all year, gave the propellor a hard spin, the engine turned over, and they began to wobble forward over the coarse grass, gathered speed, ran the length of the paddock, and lifted gently at the last moment over a slip-rail fence, just failing, further on, to touch the top of a windbreak of ragged pines. They were up.

  They made a great circuit of the local country, at one point crossing the border. They flew close up to the slopes of the Great Divide, saw a scatter of bright lakes to the south and big rivers down there, high to the point of flooding, rolling brown between cane fields, then turned, and there was the coast: white sand with an edge of lacy surf, then whitecaps in lines behind it, then limitless blue. Bert pointed out a racetrack, and at Southport there was the ferry-crossing and the pier, beyond it the Broadwater dotted with sails and the rip below Stradbroke Island. On the way back, flying lower, Jim had a clear view of what he had already seen in imagination: the swamp and its fringe of tea-tree forest; the paddocks, first green with underlying water then dry and scrubby, that sloped towards the jagged hills, and on the other side the dunes; the two forested hummocks that were Big and Little Burleigh; and a creek entering the sea over a sandbar, through channels of every depth of blue. It was all familiar. He had covered every inch of this country at ground level and had in his mind’s eye a kind of map that was not very different from what now presented itself to the physical one. It was, if anything, confirmation; that what he had in his head was a true picture and that he need never go up again.